Faculty Voice

ART INTEGRATION: CONNECTING ART AND ACADEMICS

Picture yourself walking down a school hallway. From one door singing is heard. You pop your head inside and find students practicing vocabulary for an upcoming history quiz as alternative lyrics to the latest song by the artist, Adele. In a classroom across the hall, students wiggle and sway, choreographing dance movements to showcase their understanding of the digestive system. In yet another, you find students huddled together, enjoying each other’s homemade pinball machines, constructed solely out of cardboard and recycled materials, to highlight the functioning of simple machines.

This is art integration.

According to the Kennedy Center’s “Changing Education Through the Arts” program, art integration is “an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. (...) a creative process which connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.” Art integration allows teacher and students to look beyond the often confining and rigid walls of academics and invites them into a way of learning that can be more memorable, powerful, and meaningful. It stimulates right-brain thinkers, providing them better access to traditional academic subjects. For example, during a third grade unit on the Human body, I wanted my students to understand the process of digestion while utilizing their bodies to express what they learned in class. Together, we discussed and practiced the Five Elements of Dance (Body, Action, Space, Time, and Energy), then they were charged with creating a dance to showcase their functioning of the digestive system. Though they were at first a bit hesitant, students were rapidly captivated and created a choreography that was both fun and enriching.

Long before concepts like “multiple intelligences theory” and “multiple-discipline education” were coined, humans intuitively used techniques that drew upon two or more regions of the brain to better retain information. Medical students are sometimes taught an Ancient Greek method called “memory palace” where information is placed within ‘rooms’ in a mental visualization of a physical space. In a recent study, medical students who were taught the method were twice as likely to have a perfect score on a test than those not taught. In that same study, students taught a 50,000-yearold Australian aboriginal technique that incorporates “elements of placebased narrative, image, and metaphor” were three times as likely to score perfectly over the control group.* Students are more engaged in the classroom when more of their brain is engaged in learning; the arts pull students’ minds toward the creative and triggers parts of the brain that are not usually activated by pencil and paper.

When young children learn the alphabet by singing a song and following a rhythmic beat, art facilitates learning. Why stop at the most rudimentary parts of education? Arts integration is a technique that successful teachers have employed for thousands of years. By formalizing the concept, teachers at all levels can be more mindful about practicing these methods to enrich learning—even for advanced concepts. For instance, students analyzing the tone and mood in the novel, Don Quixote, could embody their understanding by performing a traditional flamenco dance.

Work in the 21st century is increasingly creative, and brings together multiple disciplines to address new markets and to solve new problems. Often these disciplines must be learned on the job, in the moment. Learning how to better learn and how to draw connections that are not obvious— arts integration helps students do exactly those two things!

So the next time you want your child to learn something, consider enlisting the help of an artist and marvel as they beat-box the names of the key figures in the American Revolution, or create a mural with a knight in alkaline armor trying to save a halogen princess from a dragon that breathes noble gases. Choreograph a dance for the order of operations. Design puppets and perform a show commemorating the Underground Railroad.

Now, doesn’t that sound fun?

Tifany Champouillon, Lower School Teacher

* Resner, David. Australian Aboriginal techniques for memorization: Translation into a medical and allied health education setting. PLOS One. May 2021. (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal. pone.0251710)